erotic literature, erotica, novel, humor, female erotica, Chateau Dietrich, bi-sexual, Provence
Chapter One
The Arrival
The day was tucking itself into bed under a blanket of growing darkness as the lights blinked on at Chateau Dietrich.
Then, they blinked off again.
They came back on for about a minute or so but they were really flickery.
Flickery enough to hypnotize nearby owls or spell “dijanowitzicatan” in Morse Code.
An attractive woman stood silhouetted in the building’s ancient doorway as she gazed out into the cool clear night.
(That was when the lights were on, which was admittedly intermittent.)
Then there was a loud bang, a yelp and the sound of a Frenchman cursing.
That seemed to fix things, at least momentarily.
Across from her now less-flickery shadow was a long stone table that had been there since the war.
Which war, no one was quite certain.
There’d been so many of them over the years.
Religious wars.
Territorial wars.
Cultural wars.
Wars because people didn’t have anything better to do that weekend.
Above the table, a 450 year old oak tree reached up into the starry sky.
Oh, if that majestic piece of wood could only talk, the tales it would tell.
For all of humankind’s triumphs and foibles had been played out under its shady limbs.
It had seen love, betrayal, passion, hatred, sorrow and joy.
And, it had seen Germans.
Lots and lots of Germans.
Most of them, armed and wearing helmets.
Why were the Germans so quick to grab a rifle and invade their neighbors?
Some experts theorize it was all part of a cunningly-evil master-plan to wipe out humor in the rest of Europe so that they wouldn’t be the only ones who didn’t get the joke.
But more about the dreaded Hun in a few moments. Right now, it was a beautiful moon-soaked evening in the south of France. Beyond the tree and the table and the large gravel patio, arose the vine-filled hills of the sprawling Château Dietrich estate. Over three thousand acres of pure heaven: Especially if you enjoyed the odd tipple and there wasn’t a human being within a hundred miles, who hadn’t dedicated his or her entire life to it. There’s a wise old saying, that behind every great Frenchman, there’s a woman holding him up…because he’s usually blind drunk by lunchtime.
The sun, the soil, the air and grape had conspired to create this magical island of intoxicating beauty and liquids. Time may not have stopped here, but it had at least slowed down to a bearable pace; a tiny, blessed oasis of “what used to be” in the vast desert of what is and what will one day swallow us all.
This Camelot, this Shangri-La, this Chateau Dietrich.
Of course, that wasn’t always its name.
This is France.
Dietrich isn’t really a French name despite the “You Know Who’s” centuries of ardently trying to make it one.
The imposing stone and oak edifice was given its current, brazenly Teutonic moniker a scant 18 months ago when the estate was purchased lock, stock and wine-barrel by Katrin Peters.
The locals, who were as French as smoking after sex, weren’t particularly happy with the new name or the new owner’s land of birth but occasionally, one has to put aside one’s compulsion to heat up tar and feathers, if only for practicality’s sake.
For truth be told, the estate was in desperate need of a substantial facelift.
The same could be said of the previous proprietor and the hotel only required slightly more scaffolding.
Therese Dieudonne had slowly transitioned from a hotelier to a “drinkier”.
Most of her days and as much of the night as she was conscious for, were consumed with consuming.
For the last few wobbly years, she’d been content to let the marginally trustworthy staff police themselves while she concentrated on swallowing her estate, one glass at a time.
As long as they continued to bring her bottles of liquid sunlight (and she had enough corks under her bed to reconstruct the
Kon-Tiki), whatever else befell her crumbling empire was someone else’s problem.
But alas, even a business model as sound and well thought out as Madame Diudonne’s can encounter the odd downturn in fortune.
Employing a hotel staff that outnumbered the guests and having an owner who out-drank the staff (which took some doing) had pushed the grand old estate to the very edge of insolvency.
So, it was with a very heavy heart and an even heavier liver that Therese put paradise up for sale.
The Chateau needed a new owner and the new owner desperately needed a new life. It was a perfect match.
Although Katrin spent the vast majority of her pretty years in the land that brought us the Blitzkrieg, sauerkraut and charming bedtime stories about witches eating unloved children, Southern France was not totally foreign to her. Ms. Peters (then Dietrich) had capered about extensively in this breathtaking corner of the globe in the halcyon days of her youth. And, it must have included a healthy dollop of carnal capering because she ended up with a big French bun in her German oven. From that point on, Halcyon rapidly devolved into hellacious. This giddy, comely lass of a mere seventeen summers had had a wild affair with a much older man. While he didn’t seem to mind how young she was, he did seem to mind how pregnant she was. Her geriatric swain quickly disappeared. The baby did not. That was 23 years ago. A lot of very sensible and unhappy water had flowed under her bridge since then.
Facing a rather dark future as a young single mother in a foreign land, Katrin returned to Germany and married the first guy who would have her and her ever-swelling belly.
It was hardly the non-stop festival of lights and love that little girls are told to expect but children can be expensive and sometimes one must place need ahead of personal happiness.
And happy, she was not.
When Katrin bit the having-a-baby bullet and married Rolf Klein, she was so distraught she wanted to throw the bridal bouquet to herself.
It was far, far from a match made in heaven or even Provence.
Her husband was the leader of a fringe, ultra-right-wing “We-Hate-Everyone-Who-Isn’t-Us” party.
In some small ways he was perfect.
First of all, he was rich and could afford to give Vanessa (the soon to be born love child) the upbringing and education that Katrin could not have managed on her own.
Secondly, and almost as important, he had no clue how much she loathed him.
This is the real secret to any ongoing, long term relationship.
Plus, there was the blessed fact that Rolf was not very demanding when it came to the boudoir.
Some husbands fire blanks, Rolf never even took out his revolver.
Their wedding night of untold romantic bliss consisted of a half-hearted drunken grope and a lot of snoring.
This became an unpleasant and unbroken pattern for the next few thousand bedtimes.
Katrin learned to make do with a lot of spirited masturbation and earplugs.
And there this miserable mom lay for two decades; the sad, un-ravished but loyal wife of Rolf, the rising Prussian politician. An ultra-right-wing, chest-thumping, anti-immigration, anti-gay rights, man’s man.
Unfortunately, Rolf
was a man’s man.
When his picture ended up in
Bild two years ago
dressed as
Marlene Dietrich with a ball-gag in his mouth, Katrin thought it was perhaps the appropriate moment to reassess their tepid marital union.
Suddenly, the reason for all her un-ravished-ness became abundantly clear.
Why her husband had been a weight on her mind but not on
her.
It was finally time for Katrin to stop not-taking-one-for-the-team and start enjoying herself.
Life was short and happiness was about as hard to find as sober priest.
This was her moment and by God, she was going to take it.
This new and ecstatic divorcee had always dreamed of retiring to a beautiful villa surrounded by eyeball-humping countryside and ancient grapevines.
Surely, this was not too much to ask for the endless, dreary years of loyalty that she had given to Mr. Ball-Gag; for the countless nights she had spent self-pleasuring herself under the bathtub faucet while he was out with the boys being strapped to something called a Rectal Rodeo Machine.
Alas, there aren’t many luscious breathtaking vineyards in Germany but there are oodles of them in France. Unfortunately, there are also oodles of French people in France. But even they were better than the Berlin press, which harassed her night and day. The French may have been a rude and undisciplined people, but at least they wouldn’t be setting off flashbulbs in her face at 6:30 in the morning as she tried to take Rolph’s empties out to the garbage. And if they did, at least they’d be her empties.
As Katrin stood in the doorway and bathed herself in the soft light of the fading sky, it was difficult to believe that it had only been 18 months since she’d been driving though the sun-drenched Provence countryside towards her new home. Her new life.
The rich, creamy icing on this already big, fluffy convivial cake was the fact that she had her newly college-educated daughter with her.
For the last four years, Vanessa had been away in the U.S., at Harvard, taking a vacation from her mother.
There was love and there was fealty but they
were mother and daughter after-all, which can be an interesting and complicated relationship at times.
It can also be ear-splitting and door slamming.
College years can be transformative.
Booze and sex, living up to your armpits in garbage and once waking up naked in a
BostonMarket’s all-you-can-eat salad bar can give you a whole new perspective on life.
Freedom from an overprotective-but-well-meaning mother can cause a certain amount of interpersonal friction upon that freedomed-person’s return to the familial homestead.
Love and bitchiness are not mutually exclusive.
It had been a somewhat tense journey, thus far.
A lot of arm-folding and non-specific but bitter grumbling swirled eddy-like around in the car’s interior as
Johnny Neel’s “
EveryKinda’ Blues” chugged out of the sound-system speakers.
“I still don’t get why you’re doing this,” she harrumphed. “And I really, really don’t understand why I’m doing it.”
“You want to go back to Germany and your father? And the press? You wouldn’t be safe. The dresses in your closet wouldn’t be safe.”
“I thought he hated gay people.”
“And blacks, and Asians, and Gypsies, and Atheists, and the French, and the English, and Buddhists, and Muslims, and Jews, and the poor, and the unemployed, and liberals, Americans, feminists, and psychiatrists – gee I wonder why he hated them – and musicians, and the Austrians and the Belgians, and unionists, and communists, and socialists, and Filipinos, immigrants, and shopkeepers, and people who looked British but weren’t, Indians, people who like Indian food, young people, the elderly, vegetarians, the media…I mean, cut him a little slack.
That’s an awful lot to try and remember.”
Vanessa shrugged and reached for a power bar in the back seat.
If she’d reached for a toothbrush, a vase, twenty-two empty Coca-Cola cans, a one-eyed teddy bear, eighty-seven used Kleenex or an antique clock, it would have still been in the back seat.
Katrin had crammed, and I do mean crammed, everything worth taking from her old life into her
VW SUV.
(Except for the coke cans and the used Kleenex.
They were relatively new arrivals.)
What they had saved in gasoline had easily been negated by the knees-up-in-cheekbone misery inflicted upon them by such a spatially penurious vehicle.
Katrin had the front seat pushed so far forward that when she wanted to go around a corner, she had to force all the air out of her lungs so the turning steering wheel wouldn’t rat-a-tat-tat on her breasts like a baseball card on bicycle spokes.
This compulsory coziness had not helped elevate the bonhomie between the two women as they neared the 14
th butt-numbing hour of a 15 hour drive.
To be fair, Katrin had had very little automotive choice.
She’d drained just about every penny of her divorce settlement into her dream chateau/vineyard/hotel and this was no time to be throwing money around on exorbitant luxuries such as a vehicle that was big enough to breathe in.
Onward and upward was the only course to take, no matter how Inquisitionally uncomfortable their mode of transportation.
Johnny Neel had given way to
Adrian Jimenez on the radio.
Katrin really, really liked the blues.
“I just realized,” opined a road-weary Vanessa, “I’ve spent the last 14 hours farting into the pillow that I’m going to be resting may face on tonight.”
“It’s a hotel. They’ll provide you with a new one. At least, I hope they will.”
“But I can’t sleep unless I use my own pillow. I’ve just spent an unendurable eternity cramped-up in this car from hell; don’t make me spend the entire evening inhaling my own bum smell.”
“Jesus Christ. Just hang it out the window. Forty-five minutes or so of car breeze should be able to waft away14 hours of girlie farts.”
Vanessa sighed.
“I should have never eaten those
frikadellens for lunch.”
Katrina was correct.
There were big feathery pillows in each and every room at the Chateau.
Coincidently, her pillow was being used at that very moment.
The very beguiling head of Josette the maid was lying upon it.
And the very humpy-pumpy body of Olivier Duchamps, the hotel chef and lothario in residence, was lying upon her.
Not that one can blame Olivier for his badly-timed session d’amour.
Firstly, he’s French and the French have always had a hard time controlling their infamous, if less than impressive, naughty parts.
Secondly, Josette looked as if you’d taken all the best parts of angels and glued them together to form a single heavenly girl.
She was young and blond and possessed the kind of breasts that would have made that brave little
Dutch boy pull his finger out of the dike and try and to stick it in her.
While all roads may have led to
Rome, all
penises, if they had any say in the matter, would have led to dear, sweet Josette.
In centuries past, sonnets and madrigals by the score would have been penned or quilled in her honor.
Knights would have gladly jousted their brains out for a mere whiff of her hankie.
Armadas would have set sail on dark and perilous seas to gift her with the finest silks and spices from the orient.
But in today’s regrettably less romantic times, she had to settle for a randy chef trying to bang a quickie into her before the new hotel owner showed up.
Olivier, for his part, was handsome and rugged and could talk the dress of a park statue. He had dedicated his life to three things: Cooking, making love to beautiful women and hating Americans. His resolve was sorely tested when he ran into beautiful, hungry American women, but most of the time he had managed to remain steadfast and faithful to his picayune ideals.
Josette sighed like the
trade winds wandering past palm-shaded islands as he plied her warm, wet woman basket with his pink, butter-filled baguette.
His Gallic gonads were pounding her Parisian pudenda into Hexagonian hysterics.
In terms that even an Australian could understand, they had thrown their mattress meat on the libidinous Barbie and were now feasting on the massive carnal cookout.
But no matter how enthusiastically she was responding to the throbby, heaving helping of Olivier’s mast-like manhood, Josette could not help being thrown off her orgasmic game by a soupcon of trepidation. “Oh, Monsieur Duchamps, we should not be doing this. I have to finish cleaning Madame Peter’s room.” The bed clanged like an old Pakistani ferry motor as he haphazardly flung his outer most dangly bit into her inner most enclave. “And change the sheets…again.”
She had a point. The suite looked like a plane wreck, minus all those little tiny liquor bottles. Keith Richards has woken up in tidier hotel rooms. There were clothes strewn everywhere. Furniture and several free-standing light fixtures had been knocked unconscious as the time-challenged lovers clumsily made their intertwined, heavily petted way to the mattress. Plus, the bedside clock may have been three or four minutes fast.
He bit softly into her left nipple and made a sound much like a bee throwing up.
“She is a German. Let her sleep on the dew of our legendary French sex organs.” Olivier generously offered.
“I don’t think she would like that.”
The proud and mighty baker of pastries shifted positions, placing Josette’s knees up next to her ears.
“She wouldn’t even know what it was.
I’m surprise Krauts have any children at all.
I mean, look at those sausage worshipping Alp fuckers.
No wonder they drink so much goddamn beer, they couldn’t bear to touch each other, otherwise.”
Olivier began to suck and nibble on her big toe – while simultaneously continuing on with his less foot-centric plunderment.
He pumped her like she was the last working artesian well in the
Gobi Desert.
“She seemed…very nice…on the phone.” She suggested between pelvic heaves.
“Nice! Peh!” He spat her toe out of his mouth in German-hating disgust. “She probably has a cast iron cunt.”
“That is not a very nice word!”
“Nice word?
She’s a German for Christ’s sake.
Have you heard that language?
Every syllable they speak makes them sound like they’re beating an orphan with a tire iron.
Officious, Goose-stepping bastards!”
He began to invade her even harder, adding a little Arian-bashing aggression to his pelvic ardor
“Do you think she’d like it if I put some flowers beside her bed?”
“You know, if you keep talking like this, it’s very distracting. It’s going to take me all day to finish. We could still be in here when she arrives.”
“Mon dieu! I shall be quiet.”
“You don’t have to be totally quiet. Just stop talking….swearing is okay.”
She nodded, moaned loudly and tightened her girlie soup tureen around Olivier’s pleasure ladle.
The Pakistani-ferryboat-motor-clanging picked up a couple of knots.
After-all, it was only polite to accede to a lady’s expedited ravishment request…plus, he wanted to squeeze in a couple of games of
Mario Kart before lunch.
“It slipped,” offered a very apologetic Vanessa.
Back on the road, things had not been going as well as one might hope for our intrepid travelers. Their car was now parked on the side of the motorway and they were being chastised by a considerably pissed-off Frenchman. This is not an uncommon occurrence, except this time there was a reason for it.
“This is an outrage. An abomination. I will rub a fish’s butt over a picture of your mother! Who is going to fix my tractor?!” he queried at the top of his lungs.
“Please forgive us, monsieur. My daughter is an idiot,” reasoned Katrin.
“Me? It was your idea!”
The pillow had been receiving a very good airing indeed when a small gust of wind had wrenched the white, puffy, fart-filled cushion out of poor Vanessa’s girly fist.
From there, it had been propelled backwards at a ferocious velocity into the windshield of the man whose tractor now sat impaled on fencepost.
Steam and disturbing gurgling noises arose from the machine’s stricken engine.
Not dissimilar to what happened to
Elvis Presley just before he keeled over on his toilet.
It seemed to be suffering horribly in its fossil-fuel-powered death throes, like some mortally wounded be-pistoned beast begging to be put out of its misery.
“What the fuck is wrong with you fucking people? I shall mail you the sweat from my ball-sack!” he continued to inquire.
The farmer (I think we can assume that most people driving tractors are either farmers or tractor thieves.) was a rather rotund individual with less than spotless attire. It is fair to say that the multicolored and fragrant souvenirs of a hard day’s (possibly week’s) farmin’ were on ample display about his tunic. While the bright light of his youth may have dimmed to a pin-prick of incandescence (The kind of a beam you get out of your flashlight in an emergency. The one you always meant to change the batteries in, but now there’s a power outage and it’s pitch black and there’s no way to get to the bathroom without killing yourself.), he was still a robust individual that was more than a match for two tired, skirt-wearing females.
Katrin tried to return things to a more cordial tone. “It was an unavoidable accident and we sincerely apologize. My daughter was attempting to air the flatulence out of her pillow.”
“Damn those frikadellens,” thought Vanessa.
A sudden realization sprang up in his brain like Carrie’s blood-soaked grave-arm. He looked very severely at the two of them. “You’re fucking Germans, aren’t you?”
Vanessa’s nationalistic dudgeon was immediately heightened, “Oh yeah. Well, you’re fucking French and smelly…or is that redundant?”
The tractor let out another sickly gurgle and something started to ooze out of its tailpipe. It was getting more Elvis like by the minute. Time to foster a little détente to diffuse the problem at hand.
“Perhaps your tractor isn’t as badly damaged as you think. Perhaps? Is it?”
“How dare you call me a Fucking smelly French person in my own fucking country, you Germanic hag! Go back to that fascist shithole you came from and leave us and our roadways in peace.”
Katrin could see that her détenting wasn’t going as well as hoped. She thought she might try and leaven the mood with a little international olive branch. “Well, we’re all one big happy country now…since the unification.”
“Fuck the unification.
Fuck open borders and those shitty little fucking worthless
Euros.
I want the franc back!
Go home and make that schnitzel shit for your poor just-following-orders husband.” He counter-détented and let out a belch that actually pushed the girls’ hair back.
After an initial moment of revulsion and nausea, Katrin’s dander rose up to match her daughter’s. “I am home, you smelly, disgusting prick. I own a hotel up the road,” she counter-counter-détented.
“You do until I sue it off of you.” He grabbed the back of his sweat-caked neck. “Yes, I think I feel severe whiplash coming on.”
This caused a slight pause in the vitriol and mudslinging festivities. The tractor vomited up some blackish-green goo and then died.
Cooler, less expensive heads needed to prevail. “Listen, I don’t think we need to be dragging judges and lawyers into this. There’s got to be some way for us to make this up to you…” The breeze shifted and Katrin got a substantial nose-full of Mr. Farmer’s hairy chest vapors. “Financially!”
This proud tiller of the soil eyed the two women closely. A little too closely for the girls’ liking. He looked over at their car. He looked at them again. He shrugged. “Show me your tits and we call it even.”
Katrin was suitably horrified and appalled. “I beg your pardon? I am not showing you my breasts!” She declared defiantly. Then she noticed that she was sticking her chest out at him so she pulled it back in a little - but not too much as she didn’t want to weaken her defiant look. It was a very thin, defiant but not-too-breasty line she was trying to walk.
“I don’t want to see your old, withered tragedy bags, you Bavarian gorgon. I want to see hers.” He pointed lasciviously at the very shocked Vanessa.
“You miserable, pathetic, shit-stained pervert.” She spat on the ground in front of his feet. To be honest, he’d see worse.
The farmer shrugged. “Then you will be hearing form my lawyer. And he’s a Jew. When he finds out you’re Germans, he’ll probably take my case for free.”
“I didn’t say she wouldn’t do it.”
“Mom!”
The farmer took out his cell phone. “I am going to take a photo of her young and supple boobies and I am going to put the picture on my website and say, ‘Look at these. These are the silly German tits that killed my tractor.’”
“Well, you can go and fuck yourself and your old dead tractor while you’re at it!” was Vanessa’s jaunty reply.
“Monsieur, please allow me to confer with my daughter in private.”
Katrina smiled weakly at their victim, grabbed Vanessa’s elbow and led her a few feet away from the recently deceased agricultural behemoth.
“So what’s our plan?” Asked Vanessa. “If you can distract him, I’ll kick him in the nuts.”
“That’s not quite what I had in mind.”
“Well, what do you have in mind?”
“You lifting up your shirt and letting him take a picture. I mean, it is our fault…Your fault.”
“Turning me into a sex slave is your plan?”
“Now normally, as your mother, I would object, in the strongest possible terms to you exposing your breasts to a strange stinky man on the side of the road, but these are not normal circumstances.”
“I’m reporting you to the children’s abuse society.”
“You’re 23. I don’t think they protect children that old. Who knows what would happen if he dragged a couple of Germans in front of a French judge.” She looked pleadingly at her offended offspring. “We could lose everything.”
“If it’s so fucking important, why don’t you show him your tits?”
“Because he’s already stated, in rather rude terms I thought, that he has no desire to see mine. Plus, I can keep an eye on him while you’ve got your shirt up over your face. I don’t like the look of him.”
“Oh fantastic!”
“You’ll be perfectly safe. I’m going to pull the pepper spray out of my purse while he’s ogling your nipples.”
“And this is what you want?”
“Of course it’s not what I want but we’ve only been in this shithole country six hours and I’m already on the verge of losing my hotel and your first real job. Let’s just get this over with and we’ll never even have to talk or think about it again. And…it was your fart pillow that caused this whole mess.”
“All right!
Jesus Christ.
I am never going to fart again!”
Vanessa turned pointedly away from her mother and marched over to old Mr. Crusty Clothes.
“Okay asshole, here they are.”
She lifted her shirt, making sure to hook her fingers under the bottom of her bra as she brought her hands up.
Vanessa had seen this done in a spring break video her old roommate was in.
A sickeningly, dirty feeling landed in the pit of her stomach as she felt her bouncies spring free from their protective cottony cups.
They were so gorgeous, even her mother was impressed by them.
She thought back to her own golden years of ridiculously perky fondle-kittens and sighed.
Luckily, Vanessa had her shirt up over her face, so she didn’t have to look at Mr. Charming’s lurid smile while she debased and humiliated herself.
Time passed.
More time passed.
“What are you waiting for?” Katrin complained.
“I’m waiting for her nipples to get fully erect in the breeze.
Our proud French wind is feeling up your daughter.
How do you like that you
Black Forest bitch?”
“My arms are starting to ache.”
“Vanessa. Keep your shirt up over your face until this awful man takes his disgusting picture of your breasts and puts his camera away.”
“Thanks mom.”
Francoise LaPlace descended the majestic main staircase of the chateau with an enormous ornate silver tray in her hands and a “don’t fuck with me” look on her face.
Mornings were not something Francoise cared for.
They were not something she had planned to see a whole lot of and they were really beginning to piss her off.
She was supposed to be cruelly ordering her own maids around, not actually
being one.
For young Miss Haughty was born of very old and noble blood.
Alas, the silver spoon that had been firmly rooted in her mouth since birth had quickly turned to termite-infested wood after she met the love/hate of her life, Jean-Luc LaPlace.
(No they are not brother and sister – She married the idiot.)
Their ill-fated meeting transpired two years ago on a preposterously swanky yacht off the coast of Ibiza.
It was during this champagne and cocaine-fueled status orgy that she first espied her soon-to-be husband.
She was having sex under a rather inept son of a Viscount when she spotted Jean-Luc receiving oral gratification from midget prostitute on the next couch.
He was handsome and witty and stinking rich.
What else could a girl want?
She thought he had an endearing little smile, just as he came into the hair and eyes of his economy-sized rent-a-date.
When the Viscount’s son finally gave up and wandered off to have a sandwich, she went over and introduced herself.
The very next morning, after they’d both finished vomiting uncontrollably, he asked her out.
As far as Jean-Luc was concerned, Francoise was an absolute gift from the gods. Though, an expensive one. He wined her and dined her and bought her everything. Within a month they were engaged to be married. Her family didn’t approve. It was the only wise thing that they could ever be accused of doing. Jean-Luc wasn’t from a well-respected and ancient moneyed family that had made their fortune in the slave trade. And he wasn’t descended from the non-beheaded aristocracy. He’d earned his money the new-fashioned way…he’d won it in a lottery. A big, big lottery. The choice was clear. She could either accede to her family’s fairly reasonable wishes and find a suitable, if unexceptional mate, (Maybe the Vicscount’s son had finished his sandwich by now) or she could be cut off from them and their fortune and whore around Europe’s absolute trendiest dives with this dissolute dishrag. They were married within the week and whoring within a week and five minutes. Within six months the money ran out. He had won a lot but he had spent even more. The fact that he spent most of it on Francoise did not in any way mitigate her fury. And damn it all to hell, there was no going back to the loving, nurturing bosom of her family. She tried that and they told her to go fuck herself. And there wasn’t much going forwards either. As a matter of fact, it was at this very hotel that their pot of gold had run out of nuggets and he was forced to break the sobering fiscal tidings to his inconsolable beloved. With no cash or credit cards with which to settle their bill, they were forced to offer their exceedingly humble services to this fine but rundown hostelry in return for not being thrown in jail. Bam! The non-stop party train had abruptly run out of track. It had now been over a year of cleaning toilets and changing sheets, not to mention finger pointing, name-calling and minor violence followed by savage sex. Theirs had been a complicated relationship.
Francoise bad-temperedly kicked the kitchen door open and strode quickly in to dispose of her heavy load. One small sniff of the air let her know that Carl Fournier, the estate’s vintner was somewhere in the vicinity, scrounging around for scraps.
Truth be told, and it seldom was around Chateau Dietrich, Carl was the only reason the estate had lasted as long as it had.
He was not a young man or a handsome one.
Nor was he charming, smart, slim or frequently-bathed.
His table manners would put houseflies off their dinner.
Nature had certainly not bestowed an embarrassment of gifts upon this rather dowdy, disagreeable creature but the singular one he did possess made up for his innumerable and frequently off-putting shortcomings.
Carl Fornier knew his grape. He was the Camus of the cabernet, the Verlaine or the vine possibly even the Zamfir of the zinfandel. Carl produced some of the finest wines in the region. Sales of Chateau Dietrich syrah, grenache, caignan, Semillon and Clairette were the thin line between survival and Monty-Python-level penury for the rag tag staff and owner. They certainly couldn’t survive on the few guests that dared to brave the sporadic service the hotel provided. Unlike the poorly cleaned rooms, the irritable plumbing and the narcoleptic electrical system, the vineyard was a spotless work of art. There were only two things in this life that Carl treasured; his precious vines and his truffle pig, Pinky. Some thought he treasured his pig a little bit too much. Unnaturally much. Creepily much. Possibly even unspeakably much!
“Are you stealing our food again to feed that goddamn pig?”
“Pinky is very upset. She eats when she’s upset. A new owner! She doesn’t like it and I agree with her. Things were just fine. And a German to boot!” He sniffed a bowl of leftover something, cringed and put it back in the fridge.
“Things can’t be any worse than under that boozed-soaked witch upstairs.” Francoise snorted.
“That old witch is the known. The known is good, even when it’s booze-soaked. This German is the unknown. The unknown is bad. And…A German!”
“I’ll piss in her morning coffee, if you’d like.”
Carl nodded wisely. “Not a lot. Just enough that you know your piss is in there but not enough that she can taste it.” His short-lived moment of cheer collapsed under the murderous weight of an ominous future. “No good can come of this. Suppose this new woman doesn’t like me? The Madame, she loves me. Madame Dieudonne is my best customer.”
“She certainly is. She had two bottles of your Syrah this morning.”
“The 89?
The
Syrah 89 is the only year that would go well with eggs.”
Back on the road, the winds of luck were finally turning in our heroines’ favor.
Katrin and her livid-but-re-clothed daughter were back in the car and in a few short minutes, they would be on the very threshold of the Chateau.
Their new home!
Brand new and exciting lives were about to begin.
Katrin could feel a big, screaming “Yahoo!” bubbling up inside her like rotting dinosaur gas from the La Brea Tar Pits.
It doesn’t sound that appealing, but we should all be so lucky to have rotting-dinosaur-gas-sized happy bubbles.
Katrin was as mellow as
Donovan Leitch’s yellow.
Sure, they had just experienced a minor bump in the road, but one had to be somewhat philosophical about these kinds of unfortunate events.
After all, they had escaped a potentially bankrupting encounter with only an inconsequential loss of dignity.
And it wasn’t even her dignity!
Yes, she was being very philosophical about the whole sordid affair.
Though, she was a tad miffed that the unsightly, stinky farmer wasn’t interested in seeing her maiden bumps.
Not that she wanted to expose them to that malodorous letch, but she was only beginning her forties!
Were her days of being ogled by loathsome perverts at an end?
Surely not.
Kartin lifted her still-cute chin and told herself that it would only be a matter of days before some old, gnarly troll in the village made a vulgar and obscene suggestion to her.
That provided her with some “still got it” solace.
Yes, things were on the upswing.
They even got Vanessa’s fart pillow back.
“I’m going to have nightmares about that revolting deviant.” Vanessa shivered.
“Let’s just put it all behind us. Once we get there, we’ll get you a brand new pillowcase. One that isn’t covered in pigshit, or whatever that disgusting gooey stuff is.”
“If only I could wash the disgusting, gooey stuff out of my brain.”
She shivered again.
Vanessa was exhibiting all the classic symptoms of post-traumatic-exposing-my-hooters-to-a-sweat-soaked-asshole stress syndrome.
(This is a far-too-common barmaid ailment.)
There was a small awestruck pause in the conversation as they caught sight of the two giant Greek pots on marble pillars guarding the long tree-lined driveway.
Katrin didn’t need to check the address but she did anyway.
The only experience she could compare it to was when she’d first laid eyes upon Vanessa.
She had spent hours that day holding her, kissing her head and just staring because she couldn’t believe anything so wonderful was real.
That feeling was back now but without the swishy, foggy bits from all the morphine.
The truly gobsmacked new owner of Chateau Dietrich slowed her sagging vehicle down to a crawl in order to fully soak in the lush vine-filled hills and acres of majestic forest that now belonged to her.
It gave her tingles and it wasn’t just her extremities going to sleep from the comically cramped conditions.
A very un-German giggle escaped her lips as she blew the last few molecules of air out of her lungs so she could turn the car off the road.
They were now headed straight towards their future.
Sure, they noticed that their future could use a spot of paint here and there and that their future certainly required some teeth-loosening pot holes in the driveway filled but this was no time to be picky. This was a time for celebration. This was a time for…Is that fat old man on the hillside kissing a pig?
They were out of the car and charging up the steps in an instant. Steps of rugged stone, worn smooth by hundreds of years of feet. The beauty and the history of the place were overwhelming and she wasn’t even inside yet. Katrin took a breath, said one last mental goodbye to her old life, and turned the doorknob. At least she tried to turn it. It was locked. Locked? Someone had locked her out of her new life? At a hotel? In the middle of the day? She looked at Vanessa, searching desperately for an answer to the crisis. Her daughter felt compelled to state the obvious. “Why don’t you try pulling the bell?”
The bell was pulled. They waited. She pulled it again. The Berlin Four Seasons, it was not. Another minute or so went by and Katrin decided to go with plan B and gave the door a good sturdy knock.
A tentative whisper came from the other side of the door. “Go away.”
This wasn’t even the Berlin Holiday Inn.
Katrin rapped her knuckles on the door in a rapid-fire motion to register her agitation. “Let us in.”
“We are not taking any guests today, we’re expecting these new owners and we need to clean this dump up. Come back at 5. Go play tennis or something.”
“We are the new owners of this dump.”
“Non! Non! I’m not falling for that one.” Marcel chuckled.
Vanessa had had enough. “Open up now, I need to pee!” She kicked the door violently with her heel.
“AAAHHHH! My head. You’ve killed me!”
Another, haughtier voice rose above the periodic yelps and squeals. “What is going on, you stupid little man?” Francoise sympathized. “Why are you holding your head?”
“I am blind with pain. I need a doctor! Perhaps a priest.”
“I’m the new owner and my daughter needs to pee. Could you let us in?” Katrin pleaded through the door.
“Shit!” was followed by “Get out of my way, you congenital idiot!” and then something that sounded like a kick, followed by something that was definitely a scream and then by the sound of someone fumbling with the lock. The door opened ever so slowly and Francoise’ deceptively calm face peeked out. Behind her, a young man stumbled around, holding his forehead and buttocks. “We are so sorry, Madame. He’s new. This is his first day. His last, if you would like?”
“We’d just like to come in and go to up our rooms.”
Francoise considered this. “I haven’t seen the chef all morning, so they may not be totally ready yet.”
This didn’t make a lot of sense but Vanessa didn’t care. “We can come into our own hotel though, can’t we?”
“Certainly. Would you like to hear the bad news now?”
“There’s bad news?
“Already?”
“I’m afraid so. We lent the vineyard’s tractor to Henri down the road and two crazy women drove him into a fence when he was trying to return it.”
“That was our tractor?”
Francoise nodded, “He said it is going to cost a fortune to fix it.”
Vanessa moved uncomfortably in her bra.
“That son of a bitch!”
If you like the first chapter - you can purchase the whole book here, for the price of and incredibly cheap blowjob.
